Toni Morrison ─ A Literary Life

This book reads the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author places Morrison in several literary camps, one of them that of public intellectual; another, that of scion within the publishing world. Morrison began with novels that grew naturally from her own childhood in Lorain, Ohio — The Bluest Eye and Sula — but she quickly immersed herself in a myriad of African American lives and often little-known histories. Her work throughout her career as public intellectual (reviewing books, writing essays for New York media, publishing essay collections about African American life issues) made her as significant in philosophical circles as in literary ones. Her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 brought new international attention to her writings. Translated into countless languages, Morrison's body of work has become synonymous with excellence: it has seldom been limited by being considered 'writing by a woman' or 'fiction by an African American woman.' The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of both Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.

Linda Wagner-Martin has published nearly sixty books about American letters; she recently was awarded the Hubbell Medal for a lifetime of work in American literature. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Bunting Institute fellow, the recipient of a senior National Endowment for the Humanities and many other grants, including residencies at Bogliasco and Bellagio. The recipient of many teaching and mentoring awards at both University of North Carolina and Michigan State University, she has worked extensively to make American literature a broadly based field for scholarly exploration. She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States as well as its anthology, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, and textbooks on both poetry and women's literature.